Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Reviews: the reason people read reviews is to decide for themselves whether or not they should invest the time, money and energy into reading a novel. I hope this helps readers who are like me. I read the New York Times book review of The Wallcreeper after finishing the book. What came to my mind was, The Emperor's New Clothes. But the author, the Times, the famous "blurber," all want us to see gilded gold and refined cloth. But I'm not among the NYC literati, so all I saw was a saggy, naked ass. Nell Zink attempts to hoodwink us with her patchwork prose, dry-but-flat humor and pretentious writing, into thinking she has created something fresh and new with a challenging, post-modern voice that defies definition. But I can define this type of book easily enough. When I say "fresh and new" I'm not including the clichés Zink uses throughout the book that are not used in an ironic way, but as a literal metaphors. Some examples: "You can't judge a book by its cover," and "I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!" Along with, "Garbage in, garbage out"--although she redeems this one a little. Again, she doesn't use them as a way to poke fun at clichés. She's actually employing them. On page one, we get an over-the-top explanation that, given the lack of clarity throughout the whole book, now seems rather quaint: "I opened the door and put my feet outside, threw up, and lay down, not in the vomit but near it." I'm not sure why we need that spelled out for us. Before Tiffany, the protag, throws up, her husband hits a rock in the road, it jostles her and she has a miscarriage. What he actually hit was a bird, a wallcreeper. He leaves his wife there to bleed and goes to rescue the bird and they keep it in their kitchen until the thing starts to molt and basically needs to be set free into the wild. This is the main motif of the book that gets dropped 20% in after they let him into the wild, where the wallcreeper is eaten by a hawk, miraculously right on the day when the couple goes to watch him in his habitat. It was a bit deus ex machina for me. Within the first few pages there were metaphors that, not for a lack of trying, I couldn't fathom. I think Zink was hoping readers would skim over them and not think too much on them. But before we get to the metaphor, here's what Tiffany, the protag, says to herself: "I wasn't pregnant, I noticed." This, to me, seemed totally absurd. As I said, the first lines of the book chronicle this event and her husband, acting like no husband or human being would act ever, cared more about rescuing the wallcreeper than his bleeding wife. I realize the author used this device to set a tone of post-modern bleakness and irony, but to me it fell flat. Back to metaphors. Here's the first one that caught my eye: "I clenched my hands into claws and cried like a drift log in heavy surf." Then her husband does something to her that once again, no person would do, ever: "Stephen put his hands on my ears. Much later he told me he thought if I couldn't hear myself I might stop. He said it reminded him of feedback mounting in an amplifier." From the clashing metaphors to her husband acting in completely unrealistic ways, I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief. There are many places where it felt like Zink was trying much too hard: "I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me." Then this noggin' scratcher: "I was raised on art and literature, the opiates of the intellectually underprivileged." From page one I went from incredulity, to irritation, to boredom, to incredulity again, to laughter because I was still incredulous, to relief that I was finished with the book. From what I had read, I wasn't surprised that the ending left me indifferent. The boredom came with the didactic, eternally long passages where Stephen, the protag's husband starts preaching (Zink's authorial intrusion) to Tiffany (us, the reader), about his thoughts (obviously Zink's obsession) on the environment and the European government's role/agencies/policies. It was very clear from reading that the author has an information fetish about environmentalism and wild birds. I find it ironic that I've heard Jonathan Franzen rail against over-didacticism and info-fetishes, yet he was the person not only instrumental in getting Zink to write this book, but he blurbed it as well. I loved The Corrections and Freedom, so his blurb carried weight for me, which is why I bought the book. The NYT book reviewer stated that the protag, like the wallcreeper, wanted to be wild and free. This isn't the impression I had at all. Tiffany is an apathetic, flat character who has no discernible arc throughout the book until the last 5% of the story, where she suddenly, out of the blue, does a 180-degree turn-around that I personally didn't see coming in any of the preceding events or internal processes of her character. It was as sudden a shift as a right angle and utterly unbelievable. Tiffany starts out, and remains throughout the book, a leech, entirely dependent on men financially because she doesn't want to work. Finally, in one paragraph, less than 5% away from the end of the book, she exclaims, "I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!" Yet, even with this sudden change, she…doesn't. She tells a male character in the book, "I just need you to save me." Now, I realize the author was probably trying to be ironic and humorous, but it can't be ironic if it's the actual truth. The man to whom Tiffany is speaking says to her, “…you can live in Dessau rent-free if you redecorate. I’ll pay for the materials. Isn't that what women want?” So ultimately, her earth-shattering epiphany that she suddenly wants to do something with her life does not preclude her continued financial dependence on men. This isn't a woman craving freedom, I'm sorry. Even with the male character's feeble attempt to make it "okay" by telling her she'd be doing him a favor by living rent-free in his house is presented, it feels like the author is "protesting too much" (she knows that his speech about Tiffany doing him the favor looks and seems bogus, and she knows that her character is still as helpless and dependent as ever.) Meanwhile the NYT reviewer courted the feminists by writing, "…we not only plunder our resources in an effort to 'breed and feed' but allow ourselves (especially if we are female) to be similarly plundered: physically, emotionally, spiritually, creatively." The key words here are "allow ourselves." What woman with any self-respect allows this? Too many? But if this is so, it rests on the shoulders of the woman herself, no one else's. And Nell Zink writes a character all-too willing to be plundered, who continues to be plundered, and then expects us to root for her when she takes an initiative that most people in today's world take when they're eighteen years old. The final nail in this book's coffin for me was when, after over 80% of the book goes without mentioning the wallcreeper, Tiffany is called (by the man who is rescuing her for the third time) a "butterfly among the birds…" (although I am grateful we finally got a metaphor that's coherent--butterfly=change--I am never sold on the fact that her entire personality, hopes, goals and dreams change on a dime), Tiffany retorts: "Do you mean I remind you of the wallcreeper?" Oh, this felt so forced. After reading over 95% of the book, the wallcreeper forgotten after 20% of it, the man to whom she speaks not even knowing about the event with the wallcreeper, or in fact, about wild birds at all, this bomb seemed like a wild attempt at bringing the motif back to the forefront in the most contrived of ways. To me, a novel is not a platform to proclaim your beliefs and causes to the world. It isn't about pretension and self-indulgence. It's about the reader, your audience. But because people like Franzen and the NYT book reviewer endorse the book, readers who don't know will buy it and read it, not understand it, and therefore proclaim it a literary marvel. They will pretend they see the Emperor's fine, new clothes. What the reviewer and Franzen have done with endorsing this book is lose all credibility for me as arbiters of taste. I am a hungry reader, always searching for an author who writes with heart and an earnest desire to weave a compelling tale. But it doesn't feel like Nell Zink wrote this story for me or for anyone else. She wrote it utterly for herself and her fellow environmentalist literati friends. And it leaves people like me, hungry for a true storyteller, unfed.